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Launch EC2 Scheduled Instances Action

Scheduled Reserved Instances are a new feature of AWS where you can make a reserved instance purchased based on a recurring schedule rather than 24 hours a day for an entire year. An example where this may be useful could be an application that processes data for 4 hours each Saturday. Using Scheduled Reserved Instances, you can reserve an EC2 instance to run for 4 hours each Saturday. Because you’ve reserved it, it’s

Scheduled instances cannot be started until your scheduled time-slot. And once your time-slot is done, the EC2 instance is automatically terminated. This differs from starting and stopping an EC2 instance at night because the EC2 instance is not preserved between time-slots. So you’ll need to persist your data somewhere off your EC2 instance.

Once the time-slot begins, the scheduled reserved instance can be launched, but it must be launched manually. So this manual step is still required. AWS won’t launch the instance for you.

Launch EC2 Scheduled Instances Action

We’re happy to announce today that a new action is available to assist you with your Scheduled Reserved Instances: Launch EC2 Scheduled Instances.

This action can launch your scheduled instances based on the scheduled instance ID, or it can launch all your scheduled instances. When you launch your EC2 instance, you can supply user data scripts so it can configure itself using Chef, Ansible or other configuration management tools, and start working for you immediately. Also, it can be tagged for cost allocation and cataloging.

In addition, Skeddly can optionally terminate the instance after a pre-determined amount of time.